Poetic documentary film and the coast

This thesis looks to the coast as a crucial site to consider environmental issues and I argue that the meeting point of water and land is evocative for meaning making in documentary film. I look to contemporary documentary films representing the coast and recognise the importance of style and aesthetics in communicating world views through audiovisual forms. Looking to media platforms and film festivals, a large number of poetic eco-documentaries placed at the coast have been released in the past decade. I analyse documentaries from across the world to engage with the complexity of issues related to the climate crisis and understand documentary poetics as making space for the known alongside the unknown, nourishing the potential for relation between distinct geographies. Veering away from traditional approaches in film studies, I pursue a decolonial reading of 'archipelagic thinking' and the work of the Martiniquais writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant (1928–2011). I apply Glissant's work as a framework to undertake cross-cultural film analysis. The archipelago, a group of islands connected by the ocean, becomes a metaphor for world formation and relation and formal analysis is approached through the lens of oceanic relation. Glissant's focus on poetics and material surroundings guides the research in this thesis to uncover a deepened understanding of socioenvironmental themes. I structure each chapter on themes that extend outwards towards varied associative meaning. Local depictions are favoured and I argue that by framing the local coast, we extend towards views of translocalism. When considering overwhelming global processes related to the environment and the climate crisis, archipelagic thinking and translocalism aid the comprehension of complex global processes.